What's the biggest lie you've seen related to global warming?

Question

I saw a doosy tonight. A lady who somehow became a top contributor in 3 different science sections (astronomy&space, earth sciences&geology, biology) gave us this gem from Inhofe's lackey and serial liar Marc Morano.

"Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released 'An Inconvenient Truth' in 2006."

You have to love how he incorporates a reference to Al Gore and a blatant lie all in one sentence. Pretty impressive. Seriously, to argue that the planet has cooled 0.4 deg C in just 2-3 years, you have to believe your audience is totally ignorant and gullible.

This is probably one of the biggest lies I've seen relating to global warming, because it's such a ridiculously stupid claim to say the planet cooled so much in a 2-3 year period, and it's so ridiculously easy to disprove.

Can you top that one? What's the biggest lie you've seen related to global warming?

Answer 1

Best I heard was actually just 2 days ago, debating someone from YA. He made the argument that the medieval warm period was "warmer than the greatest warming predicted by the IPCC by 2100".



Basically he was saying the MWP was 5-6 C warmer than today. More than an order of magnitude higher than even the climate proxies that guys like Spencer put forth.



But my all time favorite general argument by the skeptics is that they recently 'changed the name' from global warming to climate change. Pure and utter ignorance.

Answer 2

So she is saying the earth cooled about .4 degrees celsius, which is about right if you use June 2009 data. I would say this is not a big lie, as it is about right (maybe a little of by about .05 degrees celsius.



The biggest lie I have heard is form all the AGW loons who say th4 science is settled and the debate is over. This has got to be the dumbest lie ever told, as there has been ZERO debate in the main stream press.

Answer 3

Biggest Lie------that it is caused by man. The Earth warms,cools, warms, cools..........and so forth and so on.

Answer 4

You might as well take a handfull of pills now, all the scientist are wrong. Global temps will go up 35 degrees in just about 20 years.

Answer 5

My personal favorite one was when I was debating with someone on Youtube about whether or not CO2 has ever been the primary climate forcing. I said yes it has, most notably during the Neoproterozoic era about 550 million years ago when the oceans were covered with ice so the CO2 emitted by volcanoes accumulated in the atmosphere, ending 'Snowball Earth' conditions.



He responded "HA! The Earth is only 6000 years old! Who's the idiot now?"







If you see a REALLY good (good as in funny as in inaccurate) article, be sure to enter it to win the Christopher Booker Prize for Climate Change Bullshit. The prize is dedicated in honor of Chris Booker, a science reporter for the conservative Daily Telegraph who believes,

1 Global warming was disproved in 2008

2 asbestos is chemically the same as talcum powder and poses no threat to human health

3 2nd hand smoking poses no health risk

4 That BVE (basically, meat of mad cows) causes CJD (mad cow disease) in humans

5 that evolution is based "on nothing more than blind faith and unexamined a priori assumptions"



This is conservative "science" for you.



I still distinctly remember when the republican head of the science and technology committee called the internet a "series of tubes."



http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/feb/04/christopher-booker-george-monbiot-prize

Answer 6

The biggest lie is that global warming exists at all...



the Maunder minimum was the threshold event of the last little ice age...the current minimum is longer than the Maunder minimum was...the threshold event of the next cooling period...little ice age...has arrived.



http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/



:Product: Solar and Geophyscial Activity Summary

:Issued: 2009 Aug 21 0245 UTC

# Prepared jointly by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce, NOAA,

# Space Weather Prediction Center and the U.S. Air Force.

#

Joint USAF/NOAA Solar and Geophysical Activity Summary

SGAS Number 233 Issued at 0245Z on 21 Aug 2009

This report is compiled from data received at SWO on 20 Aug

A. Energetic Events

Begin Max End Rgn Loc Xray Op 245MHz 10cm Sweep

None

B. Proton Events: None

C. Geomagnetic Activity Summary: The geomagnetic field was at quiet

to active levels.

D. Stratwarm: Not Available

E. Daily Indices: (real-time preliminary/estimated values)

10 cm 068 SSN 000 Afr/Ap 008/011 X-ray Background LT A1.0

Daily Proton Fluence (flux accumulation over 24 hrs)

GT 1 MeV 1.1e+06 GT 10 MeV 1.9e+04 p/(cm2-ster-day)

(GOES-11 satellite synchronous orbit W135 degrees)

Daily Electron Fluence

GT 2 MeV 4.20e+05 e/(cm2-ster-day)

(GOES-11 satellite synchronous orbit W135 degrees)

3 Hour K-indices:

Boulder 3 4 3 3 2 2 2 3 Planetary 3 4 3 2 2 1 2 2

F. Comments: None





Thank you for using the Product Subscription Service. If you would like to remove a product subscription or update the personal information in your account, go to the Product Subscription Site. Please do not use the from address for correspondence, as it is not monitored. For comments or help, please contact SWPC Help.













Maunder Minimum



The Maunder minimum is the name given to a period of extreme solar inactivity that occurred between 1645 and 1710. Of particular interest is that this period of inactivity corresponds closely to one of the coldest periods of the so-called "Little Ice Age" in Europe, a time of long, cold winters that caused severe hardships in the pre-industrial revolution world. This has led scientists to extensively study the possible influences of solar activity on terrestrial climate, as well as examine other stars for evidence of activity cycle behavior similar to the Sun's.



http://science.jrank.org/pages/4184/Maunder-Minimum.html#ixzz0OswaK5GJ







The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change: Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?



John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney



Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, E-38200 La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain



http://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/lisa3/beckmanj.html



I knosw you didn't read the last submission but you need more so:



i love my carbon dioxide dot com



http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/



http://tech-know.eu/uploads/SUN_heats_EA…



http://www.tech-know.eu/uploads/Warmists…



The sheeple are here with the thumbs down without viewing the evidence, I see!



http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Sunspo…



http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/03/glob…



and more



QUIET SUN: According to NOAA sunspot counts, the longest stretch of spotless suns during the current solar minimum was 52 days in July, August and Sept. of 2008. The current spate of blank suns is putting that record in jeopardy. The sun is entering its 43rd consecutive day with no sunspots, and there are none in the offing. Deep solar minimum continues.



ARE SUNSPOTS DISAPPEARING? Sunspots are made of magnetism. The "firmament" of a sunspot is not matter but rather a strong magnetic field that appears dark because it blocks the upflow of heat from the sun's fiery depths. Without magnetism, there would be no sunspots.

Answer 7

Al Gore's book.

What an idiot.

Answer 8

Ooooh...oohh...I've got one. That Waxman-Markey is going to have any effect at all on global warming without China and India.

Oh yeah, and that it would be revenue neutral. I laughed all day at that one.

Answer 9

The best way to stop global warming is to burn every single particle of coal in the USA, and we could use a cap and trade system to make sure that happens, every single particle, all 500 years worth, burn it all, that will put a lot less CO2 into the atmosphere, and it's so safe, no mercury, no radio-carbon, no flyash, just nice safe energy, and no global warming, brought to you by The Coal Industry. We're here on PBS to program your brain and to make you happy about what we do.



That's the biggest whopper I ever heard. It assumes that no American knows anything about chemistry. It assumes that all Americans are just plain stupid. It assumes that the best way to get a lie believed is to tell a huge Whopper, that is so outrageous that no one could imagine you would say it if it were not so. Burn Every lump of coal -- make less CO2 -- Washington is so twisted -- how could they imagine anybody would go for that?

Answer 10

Telling a lie to some one else or a lot of other people is is one thing, getting paid to do it is another... but repeating it to yourself until you believe it has got to be a form of telling the biggest! And probably the most harmful.



Welcome to the United States of America in the 21st Century.



May Great Spirit have mercy upon our souls!

Answer 11

No I haven't seen bigger lie than global warming, its the biggest ever.



Oh wait there were few before global warming, like WMD in Iraq, nah... still not bigger than global warming.



I don't know where this Dana guy lives, but Toronto cooler, New York Cooler, London is cooler, Tokyo is cooler... every city in the world this year is cooler.



Now maybe someone living on venus wouldn't feel its cooler or maybe someone who's brain has been fogged up with "Gore" yeah.



Rest of the world is feeling cooler.



So no I haven't heard bigger lie than global warming itself.

Answer 12

SSJ4 Gogeta, as you can see by the answers here, the politics section is not a very good place to ask this type of question. most liberals like to hang out here (joking). listen to A Modest Proposal and Margo. they are being the most honest about this issue. no one can prove that scientists "fudge" numbers or lie. look out for baseless arguments and people who use frequent ad hominems in their answers. to get the facts, you're better off reading scientific literature on the issues you're interested in. EDIT SSJ 2 Vegito ftw ;)

Answer 13

Well I'm going with this one, from sceptic answers to one of my questions.



http://www.warwickhughes.com/agri/Solar_Arch_NY_Mar2_08.pdf



Essentially, CO2 is not significant, warming is good and global temperatures correlate well with solar cycle lengths, this being a better explanation for the observed warming.



Specifically, that there is a change in temperature of 0.73C per year of change in solar cycle length. (Shorter cycles corresponding to higher temperatures, also, there is a time lag; change in temperature corresponding to a change in the length of the previous cycle)



The problem is that, if you compare the temperatures predicted by this claim with the actual average temperatures of the cycles, (as I have done with Microsoft Excel) it is immediately obvious that there is no correlation. Indeed, it is so poor that it would be incredible if this theory was an honest mistake. It has to be a lie!



================



I would provide a link but have been unable to figure out how. If anyone is interested, and can tell me how to do it, I will post my results here.



Alternatively, try it for yourself! It's not that difficult...



Finally, I would like to add that I am not accusing anyone here of dishonesty. I'm sure the sceptics that posted the link are sincere in their belief that it is true. They are accepting it at face value, without checking, in the same way that I accept the data from CRU/NOAA that I used to test it.

Answer 14

One:you have to admire the lady for playing the system. I read that same link about a month ago. Two: I always get a big laugh when the IPCC tries to explain biological formats (mixed feelings) they have it a little less then what science says will happen. Three: trying to predict actual outcomes to past occurrences haven't really met a tangent. This is what both sides play upon. From a personal view; I'd say CO2x2, and that ghgs are insignificant ratios (only in the context of misconception). I think the biggest yarn I've heard, is that the density of floria doesn't matter.

Answer 15

"Despite his dire warnings, the Earth has cooled 0.74 degrees F since former Vice President Al Gore released 'An Inconvenient Truth' in 2006."



I'm trying to figure out where this lie originates from. My guess is that they compared the 2006 anomaly of about 0.56 (C) and compared it with the monthly anomaly of Jan. 2008 of 0.15. By this same inane logic, it has warmed 0.45 C or 0.81 F since Inhofe made that claim in 2008.



http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt



Not sure if I can top that lie, but here are a few in the same ballpark:



1. 1934 was the warmest on record



2. World glaciers are growing



3. Most scientists don't support global warming theory



4. Hockey Stick debunked!

Answer 16

My fave was Christopher Horner on the Dennis Miller program telling a very believing Miller that all of the temperature measuring devices are put on airport runways, and so what they are measuring as high temperatures is actually flames coming out of the jets.



He really did claim that, and Dennis Miller and the idiots who called into his show (yahoo violation--referring to people who believe absolutely idiotic things as "idiots") really believed him, and started yelling crazy stuff about their anti-Christ Al Gore.



(Dennis Miller has actually gotten funnier since he left Saturday Nite Live, but not in a good way)

Answer 17

Glenn Beck implying that ice is not decreasing unusually at the North pole by intentionally mistaking a declining moving average on a graph for "average" and showing that the decrease was only "slightly below average". lol, you had to be there.

Answer 18

The biggest lie about global warming is that is is caused by C02 and GHG emissions. Make no mistake about it, global warming is very real, the science is missing critical data such as the real source of heat.



Have you or anyone else seen the source of heat?

Answer 19

-- That it's man's fault.



-- We're all going to die.



-- The polar bears are dying off. Actually the population is increasing.



-- Taking a trillion or two in taxes will stop it.



-- This and last year were hot summers.



-- Global warming causes severe weather. Then we're told it evens weather out.



-- CO2 causes the temperature to rise.



-- CO2 is an insulator.



-- The concept of "greenhouse gasses" and how everything is a greenhouse gas.



-- That the weather and climate should always be stable.



-- There is apparently a perfect temperature and climate setting for the Earth. No one can find the control knob for it.



-- Driving your car causes the ice caps to melt.



-- The ice caps are melting at a fantastic rate and soon, we're all going to be under 400 feet of water.



-- Ice shouldn't melt when it's warm.



-- Glaciers never retreat and come back, and should never change.



-- Wind and solar power will solve everything.



-- Deniers just want to keep their grubby hands on their money and not make lifestyle changes to help the Earth.

Actually, it's the old idea of getting what you pay for. If you're going to charge the American public a trillion dollars, we expect to see a return on investment. Simple as that. You buy something, you want it to do as promised.

Answer 20

I would say Al Gore's twenty foot sea level raise has to be it.

Answer 21

"There is nothing happening with respect to weather and climate change", is the biggest lie I have heard and continue to hear; or is it just plain a denial?



It doesn't matter if it comes from a political leader, scientist type, social or economic leader, that guy on the street, or some one who can't read and write (of course this person would be someone from some third world country). Whether you buy fully or partially in to global warning's existence, let alone its cause/ contributing factors, I don't know of a single corner of this planet (ok arc unless you're still debating whether or not the earth is flat) where there is not enough evidence of weather and climate change that it cannot be felt. We are past the point of supposition and that a change could occur adequate to be felt, cause change, and impact the world as we know it.



To be able to accept the growing body of data related to weather and climatic change, one must first be able to accept that it is possible. Or, is that we must first have the data so that we can accept that it is not only possible but occurring. In the end, most of us realize the correlation between the chicken and the egg even though we cannot definitively determine which came first through a series of properly controlled experiments by scientists deemed to have acceptable credentials.



Back when I was in early grade school, only professional opinion that topped an engineer's was a scientist's. The lesson plan went on to teach that a scientist's primary objective was to accurately report thier observations, measurements, and data gathered. Truth, whether they understood the cause and effect was paramount. Well, in the US, we have that type of data, which is valid by definition because much of it was gathered by the government. And, that data goes back upwards of 60 years or more. Some where between my pre-calculator introduction to trigonometry with interpollation and my much later foray into statistics then small scale versus statistcally significant sized experiment design, I learned that one could take the cause and effect data of one situation and apply it to another as long as the critical criteria were similar or the same. As a system, this is not unlike going from arithmetic with no unknowns to algebra with its formulas or variable based equations. Recorded and reported small scale cause, effect, and corrective action examples exist all over this planet. We don't know all of the answers; heck we're still correlating the data that already exists and racing to decide what else we should test. Nor do we know the extent of the down stream effects of individual changes in any one ecosystem let alone the ecosystem whose borders are defined as world wide on earth, sea, air, and atmosphere. But, if you've ever tried to flow chart a process or sub-process in say the work place, you would realize that the process is dynamic, has more interactions than you even imagined until a change is enacted, and as soon as the chart is complete it is already obsolete. From a system's approach, an ecosystem is no different than work process; it is just more complex and often larger particulalry when considering the whole world plus atmosphere.



While we may have changed our value judgements about engineers, mathmeticians, scientists, and other "geeks" (this is a subjective, qualitative assesment - their underlying principals, rules of operation, and data have not changed (these are established to generate objective, quantitative data). With somewhere between a less than ideal second grade and fourth grade math and science education and understanding, if one would simply validate their own personal experience of changing weather and climate - it is only a hop, skip, and a jump to realize and accept that the data has been gathering to support one's personal experience over the course of over 60 years. From there, there is a cornucopia of puzzle pieces about the cause and remedies, but global warming as a quantified descriptive cause of climate change is clearly being drawn down into its apex. Meanwhile the causes of global warming and examples of man-made improvments to localized climates are spilling forth but, just as one does not have to know which seed was planted in which space of earth as defined by GPS coordinates to identify and appreciate the food spilling forth from a Thanksgving cornucopia, one does not need to have causes and effects defined and measured to the nth degree to realize what they are or how to affect them. First, one must be able to give their own experience based evidence some validity.

Answer 22

Al Gore's movie, and your blind acceptance!

Answer 23

That co2 has any effect at all on whether the climate warms up.

Answer 24

That it is going to happen.